Boston Scientific Partnership Targets Digital Health, Remote Monitoring For Chronic HF Patients
Boston Scientific wants to help providers improve the ways they engage with patients suffering from chronic cardiovascular diseases by introducing a digital health platform that connects providers with population data and enables remote patient monitoring (RPM). The company has partnered with software giant Accenture to develop a data-driven, cloud-based solution that will standardize care and improve both patient and economic outcomes.
Over the past year, Boston Scientific has been inking deals and forming partnerships to ramp up the integration of RPM technology into its cardiovascular portfolio, by far the company’s largest business segment. Two recent programs — based on deals with MedAxiom and TogetherMD — seek to leverage data analytics into improving cardiovascular care delivery and driving operational efficiency, as part of Boston Scientific’s Advantics solutions.
“We are focused on addressing the unmet needs of patients, physicians and healthcare systems through differentiated technologies and comprehensive portfolios within the market categories where we have deep expertise,” said Boston Scientific CEO Mike Mahoney in a statement to investors.
With its most recent deal with Accenture, Boston Scientific is focusing on patients with chronic heart failure, which the company says is one of the costliest conditions to manage in hospitals worldwide. In a press release, Boston Scientific reported heart failure accounts for two percent of European healthcare spending and carries an average hospital stay of 11 days.
The Advantics Care Pathway Transformation uses Accenture’s analytics insights platform to generate data from three different measurements: time a patient spends in the system and ways efficiency can be improved, methods of diagnosis and ongoing vital signs and risk assessment, and engagement with patients — both in the hospital and at home.
The system has already been implemented in two Scandinavian hospitals, where providers report significant insight into their systems’ weaknesses and areas for potential improvement.
“We identified a 25 percent unnecessary heart failure readmissions rate, and therefore a definite need for better care coordination, supported by modern technology and processes that can decrease overall costs,” said Kari Niemalä, CEO of Tampere Heart Hospital in Finland.
According to Mahoney, the Care Pathway Transformation is designed “to help providers standardize care, reduce overall length of stay and lower readmission rates,” which addresses an “acute industry need for some of the most costly chronic conditions.”
“Socio-economic changes are driving the market to move to value-based care, and new data driven care transformation services are a great enabler of delivering high-quality healthcare at the right cost,” said Anna O’Riordan, senior managing director at Accenture Life Sciences, in the press release.
In order to develop a successful RPM solution, developers need to do more than show themselves capable of collecting raw data. The key to RPM success is in how that data is interpreted into a feasible care strategy with proven results, said analysts from Frost and Sullivan in a recent report.
According to analysts, the industry suffers from lack of a “gold standard” established as proof-of-concept for RPM systems and solutions, and once the long-term value of RPM is proven, they expect a swift uptake in sales.
Boston Scientific and Accenture have implemented the Care Pathway Transformation program in both U.K. and Scandinavian hospitals, with plans to test pilot the program in the U.S. and throughout Europe in the near future. Though the system was designed for chronic heart failure, they indicated that it may be applicable to other conditions as well.